State, Peasant, and Merchant in Qing Manchuria, 1644–1862 (review)

Manchuria was the homeland of the Manchu tribes that united in the seventeenth century and conquered China, ruling it as the Qing dynasty from 1644 to 1911. The Manchu emperors greatly expanded the geographical boundaries of the Chinese empire and achieved great internal peace and prosperity. The Manchu homeland was ruled separately from the provinces of China, but by the eighteenth century, its administrative and social practices increasingly resembled those of the provinces. In the early twentieth century, Japan successfully competed against Russia for the economic domination of Manchuria, and, from 1932 to 1945, ruled it as the puppet state of Manchukuo. Since 1949, under the People's Republic of China, the three Manchurian provinces of Heilongjiang, Jilin, and Liaoning have constituted a vitally important industrial base.

Whereas twentieth-century Manchuria has been well studied, the history of Manchuria in the Qing period has been relatively neglected.¹ Isett's new book fills an important need by examining the Manchurian economy during the period before 1862, when Niuzhuang became a treaty port and exposed Manchuria to foreign trade. Through use of archival sources, gazetteers, Japanese surveys from the early twentieth century, and even interviews with elderly residents, Isett has gone far beyond the standard published documentary accounts upon which others have relied. He shows how Manchuria, particularly the southern portion, developed agricultural and social patterns similar to those of north China despite the Qing court's intention to control the distribution of land and to prohibit immigration by Han Chinese.

Population expanded from about 1 million in 1750 to 5 million in 1850 (and 14 million in 1900), due in large part to migration as well as natural increase. In the process, customary practices allowed commoners, increasingly Han Chinese or those of mixed ethnic background, to overcome legal segregation and to achieve firm claims to their land. Agricultural Manchuria exported abundant quantities of grain and soybeans to other parts of China—first to adjacent northern provinces, Zhili and Shandong, and then to Jiangnan—that is, the Lower Yangzi provinces —which in turn exported cotton textiles to Manchuria. This interregional trade was dominated by Shandong merchants, who dealt with a well-articulated network of grain and soybean merchants within Manchuria.

Isett's study situates this Manchurian experience within the major current debate about Chinese economic history. Put succinctly, on the one side are those who believe that the Chinese economy in the high Qing period, roughly the eighteenth century, was in an advanced state of development that was not necessarily inferior to Europe's. This view is most specifically developed by Pomeranz, who argues that eighteenth-century Jiangnan, the lower Yangzi valley region, was at an economic stage comparable to that of England at the same time.² The sentiment is expressed in different ways also by Wong and Lee.³ On the other side are those who argue that the Chinese pattern of growth was essentially different from that of Europe and that China was locked in a "high-equilibrium trap," as described by Elvin, and/or an "involutionary" pattern of labor use, as described by Huang.⁴ Isett labels the first group "Smithians," for Adam Smith, and the second group "Malthusian-Ricardians."

Isett believes that the Manchurian experience resembles that of China as the latter group perceives it, but the reason for the failure of the economy to develop, rather than merely grow, rests more on social constraints rather than Malthusian limits. "By virtue of the fact of peasant possession of land, peasants in Manchuria were not required to specialize for the market and were therefore free to pursue valued social objectives which, over time, made it ever more difficult to specialize, accumulate capital, and improve labor productivity in agriculture" (173). The custom of partible inheritance—dividing the land inheritance among sons—"shielded" peasants from market-dependent competition (192). Following the approach of Brenner in his work on the rural origins of capitalism in England, Isett repeatedly stresses that "structurally...